Cyndi Lauper interview: 'I just want to be taken seriously'

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We won the freaking Olivier!” shrieks Cyndi Lauper. The 62-year-old pop icon, her hair dyed bright pink, pumps a black leather-gloved fist in the air. “Not bad for the girl voted ‘most likely to die’ in high school.”

Lauper is having a bit of a moment. She is about to release a new album of country covers, Detour, followed by a tour and an appearance at Glastonbury. Last month, she was not only one of the star performers at the David Bowie memorial concert in New York, she also picked up two Olivier Awards for the West End production of Kinky Boots, a musical for which Lauper wrote the songs and which had already won six Tony awards in America.

“You can have all the awards in the world, but I got Best Musical, and that means everything to me,” she says. “All my life, all the record company told me was ‘You’re Cyndi Lauper, you can’t write songs like that!’ They wanted me to write Girls Just Want to Have Fun over and over again. I didn’t want to.” She holds two fingers to her temple and mimes shooting herself in the head (“Boom!”). “So when Harvey [Fierstein, who wrote the script] asked me to do Kinky Boots, of course I jumped at it. This was freedom. It was an opportunity not to be me and just to write songs!”

The London production of Kinky Boots is a double-Olivier award winner, while the US production won six TonysCredit:
Alastair Muir

The subject matter also appealed to her. Based, loosely, on a BBC documentary and a subsequent Hollywood film, the musical tells the story of the boss of an ailing Northampton shoe manufacturer who, after an unlikely encounter with a drag queen, decides to branch out into fetish wear for men. Lauper, of course, is famous for her idiosyncratic style, something that she says helped her make her solo breakthrough in the Eighties, at the age of 30, after a decade spent making music in covers and rockabilly bands.

Cyndi Lauper making a pop video in 1986Credit:
RICHARD YOUNG/REX

“I had to go around the world performing without a band so I took props and made it like performance art,” she says. “I’m not a very good dancer and I didn’t want to just stand around like an idiot during solos. So I spray-painted my legs on live television, which people thought was outrageous.” She went on to sell 50 million albums and 20 million singles, including the hits Time after Time and True Colors.

Her mix of art, fashion and humour influenced such contemporary pop stars as Lady Gaga (with whom she has collaborated) and Katy Perry. “I think women need to see another woman doing what we dream of doing to know it’s possible,” she says. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Lauper has the thickest accent you are likely to hear outside of a comedy sketch (“asked” is “axed”, “New York” is “Noo Yawk”). She chatters away from the moment we meet, her train of thought rattling from track to track, and her sentences peppered with jokes, profanities – for which she immediately apologises, “sorry for cursing, sorry” – and bursts of song.

But she is most animated when talking about her musical upbringing. Although she enthuses about English rock, from the Beatles to punk, working on Kinky Boots helped her acknowledge the impact of pre-rock ’n’ roll music on her young psyche. “I knew all the show tunes when I was five, so I’d go around the corner and sing them for the old ladies and they’d give me quarters because they thought it was cute. Sondheim, Bernstein, Rodgers and Hammerstein – they taught me to laugh and sing and imagine.”

The women of the neighbourhood in which she grew up loom large in Lauper’s recollections. “I remember how they’d talk to each other and how beautiful they were. That’s what I grew up watching: disenfranchised American Sicilian women. My mum and my aunts, their education was derailed, their dreams were derailed. That’s why I really and truly came out with boxing gloves. Because I saw what the world did to women.”

Following on from her Grammy-nominated 2010 blues covers album, Memphis Blues, Lauper’s new country album was inspired by memories of “watching TV with my nana when I was five”, and seeing Patsy Cline on a variety show. “I didn’t think she was a country artist, I just thought she was a beautiful singer and she made me think about being a singer. It was all just pop music back then. There was no separation.”

Having established herself as a songwriter, it seems surprising that her recent albums have focused on cover versions. “I wanted to keep the writing part of my brain very separate,” she says.

One piece of trivia everyone knows about Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun is that it was written by a man, Robert Hazard, as a sexist dating song in 1979. Lauper rearranged it and changed the lyrics (with Hazard’s consent) to make it her own. She went on to co-write and produce many of her hits.

Yet, when she talks about the music business you can almost feel her frustration, as she recalls how hard she had to struggle to be taken seriously. “I think my anger fuelled me,” she says. She goes on to tell tales of record executives criticising her appearance – “Is that what you’re wearing? Why can’t you dress more like Katrina & the Waves?” – and writers refusing to acknowledge her abilities: “They sat across from me, saying we should write a melody like She Bop and I’m sitting there going ‘Yeah, guess who wrote that melody? Me!’ ”

Lauper can be delightfully cynical about her own career. About the US tour she did in 2013 with Cher to mark the 30th anniversary re-release of her debut album she jokes: “They say after the nuclear war, all that will be left are the cockroaches and Cher. And I’ll probably be opening for her.”

In 2008, Lauper recorded a dance album, Bring Ya to the Brink, with top production teams in Britain and Sweden. “I worked with the guy who made poor Britney Spears sing every word separately, word for word, to get it right,” she says, referring to producer Max Martin. Lauper smacks one gloved fist into another, and emits an evil chuckle. “He didn’t try that with me. I would have had to kill him.”

Still having fun: Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein honoured with a star on Hollywood's Walk of FameCredit:
Buchan/REX/Shutterstock

The acclaim for Kinky Boots clearly matters to Lauper because, unhindered by a record company, she has been able to show what she could do all along. It is crammed with songs that are witty and emotional, encompassing a range of styles. She says she connected to the father-son theme of the narrative (the protagonist reluctantly takes over his family’s shoe business when his father dies) through observing her own husband, actor David Thornton, and their 18-year-old son Declyn.

“My husband is very funny. You’ve got to have a sense of humour in our house, because he lives with me, a teenage boy and a dog who wears a diaper. It’s not easy.” When I ask if she drew on her own childhood for the story that deals with parental expectation, she snorts, “Me? Oh hell no! People had no expectations of me, and I didn’t give a s---, I really didn’t.”

Detour is out on May 6 on Sire Records. Cyndi Lauper tours Britian in June. Kinky Boots continues at the Adelphi Theatre, London WC2